


Kansas Was a Dream

by crickets



Series: Vinegar & Honey [2]
Category: Lost
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-09-17
Updated: 2007-09-17
Packaged: 2017-10-02 06:02:56
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 915
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3330
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/crickets/pseuds/crickets
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>(Five reasons this shouldn't work.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Kansas Was a Dream

**01\. She's never done this before.**

Dead men don't collect settlements and _she_ doesn't technically exist. But here they are, in the flesh, and fumes and hollow bellies are screaming at him come a month, _Remember what you were._

But she's never done this before, and that's enough to sour it all.

Soon there are apologies on her tongue, and somewhere there's a mark, midnight train home, pockets full and heavy.

_Spared_.

And now her hand is dwarfed in his as he drags her into the room they can't afford. He's swearing and spitting and not looking at her, clouding over with something vaguely like blame, but a lot more like a revelation.

He should have left her at the start. There ain't no reason in this.

 

**02\. She is clever. She is resourceful. (She is _not_ clever. She is _not_ resourceful.) **

Whatever faith Sawyer had in her is turned off like a switch. She may know her way around a jungle floor, but this is the real world and there's no underground here. It's all hard concrete and layers of brick, foreign and cold. And people, too - real people, in towns and houses, not like the ones she used to know.

She's useless behind the door, not brave enough to walk out of it alone. (He leaves it unlocked.) He comes back, looks at her like she's going to break something, like he wasn't expecting her to be there, and never answers her questions.

(She just stops asking.)

"This is stupid," Alex says to him, tired of counting headlights, _just tired_, really. "I'm clever. I'm resourceful. I'm not _completely_ hopeless."

Sawyer smiles. _Smiles_.

"This ain't Kansas anymore, Dorothy," he says like she ought to know what he means.

Alex glances at the map on the dash. _Missouri_.

"No," she says, and she feels small beside him. "No, it's not."

 

**03\. He never says _thank you_. **

He leaves her at a diner outside St. Louis and doesn't look back. Old contacts resurfacing and a job in Little Rock and he knows she'll just get in the way. (Or maybe he just can't stand the way she looks at him, like she expects better.)

He wouldn't ever admit it, but he's rusty, and things turn south. Is this how he fails? After plane crashes and torture, smoke monsters and human ones too, bullet wounds and a broken heart? (_Was that what that was?_)

And then she's there, like she _knew_. She looks like a woman and her voice sounds like truth, but her mouth, how it lies.

_And it's enough_.

He drives faster than he needs to and she feels like throwing up. _So close_. She expects it as they cross state lines, but he never says _thank you_.

Or, _I'm sorry_.

 

**04\. They argue (like lovers do).**

_They argue._

They argue like lovers do and he thinks she's getting back at him for leaving her there. (And he didn't even pay the bill first.) Until one day she stills, and they don't argue anymore. She's working it out - _working it out_ \- and he can see her piecing it together, eyes screwed shut, next to him in the passenger seat.

She needs to protect herself, to make him see that she is worth something.

_She can't be left behind._

He watches her, watching him. She stares too long when he comes out of the bathroom, and for the first time in his life he's conscious of his own body. (How can she do that to him?) Her hips sway in that awkward teenage way, and when she walks over to him now, she's less of a woman than in Little Rock.

He catches her hand when she reaches for him, wants to tell her that she was more of turn-on when she was angry (that it swells him a little to think of it even now), and pushes her away.

"Don't be stupid, girl," he says. "That ain't the way."

 

**05\. Pencil Shavings and Astrophysics**

It's autumn in Pennsylvania and the smell makes Sawyer think of number two pencils and new beginnings. He always liked school, not that it ever showed. (It was school, he maintains, that didn't like him.)

Bright colors make Alex think of a photo that her father (_no,_ _Ben_) had tucked inside his copy of _A Brief History of Time_ \- a man and a woman, sitting in a field of fallen oranges, yellows, and reds. She's never seen that before - trees on fire, skies a cold gray.

There are words in her mouth and memories in his gut, but only the twang of some aging relic in their ears. She will never understand what the smell of pencil shavings means to him; He will never understand how astrophysics can make her miss her father. (That _is_ who he was, after all.)

"You won't leave me again?" she says to him when they stop for gas outside of Gettysburg. The constant trill of his phone at night reminds her of St. Louis just before she found herself alone.

"No," he says, catching her glance, and for the first time he sees that he's all she's got, and somehow that it's important to him now. Moments ago, that would have been a lie. "I won't."

She brings them both hot chocolate and smiles long and wide, her hand brushing his. And he thinks he could stay here a while, visit the battlefields, get a job, or an apartment. But maybe that's just autumn talking.


End file.
